Did tea party stir Brown's victory?

To hear some leading Democrats talk, Scott Brown’s campaign was fueled by the burgeoning tea party movement.

“This is not how democracy works in Massachusetts,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) thundered days before Tuesday’s special election. “Scott Brown needs to speak up and get his out-of-state tea party supporters under control.”

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In a fundraising e-mail, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the former head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, blasted Brown as “a far-right tea-bagger.”

But while the national tea party crusade is wearing Brown’s smashing victory as a badge of honor, even some of its top leaders acknowledge their loosely organized efforts were not the decisive factor in his Senate victory.

It’s true that countless members of tea party groups from across the Northeast infused Brown’s campaign with energy, cash and boots on the ground in the final weeks. But leaders told POLITICO that taking credit for the win would ignore the two most central factors that determined the outcome of the race: an angry electorate fed up with Big Government and a hard-charging underdog candidate with a keen populist touch.

“I think what we were seeing is huge dissatisfaction, and I think it transcended the movement,” said Greater Boston Tea Party President Christen Varley.

Like most of the tea party groups throughout Massachusetts, the Greater Boston Tea Party did not endorse a candidate. But Varley’s group coordinated a breakfast fundraiser with Brown on Jan. 2 at which he wooed a crowd of 300 with his stump speech and netted about $12,000 in donations.

“I think he would’ve won anyway. I just think he would’ve done it on a smaller budget,” Varley said, when asked about the impact of tea party groups on Brown’s 5-point margin of victory.

The state director for Americans for Prosperity’s New Hampshire chapter said it was individuals, more than coordinated tea party segments, that fueled the late-breaking momentum for Brown.

“I don’t think any one group can take credit for what took place in this race. Not the Republican Party, not the tea party,” said Corey Lewandoski, who grew up in Lowell, Mass., and noted that Brown’s candidacy flew under the radar for most of the fall and through Christmas.

FreedomWorks, which acts as an umbrella organization for tea party groups, first got wind of Brown’s rising candidacy through an e-mail sent from one of its members Dec. 4. Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, said he didn’t act on it right away because Massachusetts “looked like a real long shot.”

“But then it got louder and louder, with more e-mails and phone calls. It was the snowball effect,” Steinhauser said.

By late December, after conferring with an intern in Worcester to test the pulse on the ground, Steinhauser decided to put together a voter-education pamphlet comparing Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley on the issues.

Other tea party members say the movement’s awareness of the race came about the same time — a period, not coincidentally, when polls began moving in Brown’s favor.

“I started calling friends, and they started calling me, saying, ‘Do you want to go make phone calls? Do you want to go hold up signs?’” Lewandoski said.

But when Lewandoski traveled to Andover to volunteer in a phone bank for Brown on Jan. 2, he didn’t go on an invitation from a tea party.

Interviews with other tea party members revealed a similar scenario of individuals getting involved late in the campaign, and mostly on their own, as opposed to signing on to a larger orchestrated effort.

“I don’t want people to get the impression that it’s a well-oiled machine where someone presses a button and the e-mail goes to every tea partier. That just doesn’t happen. These were people on their own saying, ‘I want to go and do something.’” Lewandoski said.

Diane Reimer, a Philadelphia-area tea party activist, got inspired to head to Massachusetts on the Friday before Election Day to make phone calls and knock on doors.